Update: I’m sure Google no longer penalizes .info because it’s simply not necessary. Google can easily distinguish a spammy website. However, because .info domain names were sold so cheap ($0.99) spammers used .info extensively and .info is viewed as suspect too many website visitors. Even today, it’s so easy to find a .com by adding a word or letters before or after the name. I only use .com.

On March 3, 2008, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s anti-spam team made several predictions for 2008, one of which was, “A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.”

Because of the low cost of .info top-level domain names, they have been used by spammy web masters. What are spammy websites? That’s a topic for another article, but basically they are worthless websites, designed only to make money for the webmaster and which Google has no interest in presenting to their users. You can read about some of the characteristics of spammy websites here.

GoDaddy is now offering.info names for only $.99. Such a low cost allows a webmaster to cheaply set up thousands of spammy websites. Google has been trying to get rid of spammy websites for a long time through a myriad of methods. Google results have substantially improved over the last few years specifically because they have been successful in eliminating many spammy websites from the search results.

Apparently, Google has now started a new attempt to filter out spammy websites by identifying websites with the .info domain extension. Here is another discussion on a forum where webmasters with .info domains are complaining that they are no longer receiving any traffic from Google.

A law firm website using a .info domain extension is not a spammy website, but the .info domain extension may accidentally get you shut out of Google traffic.